“Save seeds from the best-looking plants in your garden,” says Rowen White, who directs the Native American Sovereignty Alliance’s effort to preserve the wide variety of plants traditionally grown by Indigenous communities across the country. She maintains a collection of more than 500 varieties of vegetable, flower and herb seeds, including 30 types of beans, but most people would be best served by saving what White calls a “functional workhorse collection” of five or six species. Start with a few self-pollinating plant varieties like beans, peas, tomatoes and lettuce. For beans and peas, let the pods stay on the vine until they are leathery and you can hear the seeds rattling inside. Pick them and let the beans dry indoors for a week or so.
For tomatoes, save only seeds from heirloom varieties and not hybrids, whose offspring won’t taste the same as the parent plant. Pick the fruit ripe, scrape the seeds into a jar, add water and let them sit to ferment. The flesh and goo rise to the top, and the seeds sink to the bottom. After about a week, rinse the seeds and spread them out on a tea towel to dry. For lettuce, let a vigorous-looking head bolt into bloom. Once you see the flowers turn into white fluff, like miniature dandelions, shake the stalks into a paper bag.
Store seeds in glass jars to protect them from insects and rodents. Label jars with the name, harvest date and place and any information you have about who and where the seeds came from. “I love seeds, because I love stories,” says White, who as an undergraduate, two decades ago, went back to her Mohawk community of Akwesasne, in upstate New York, to collect seeds and stories from her elders. When kept in a cool, dark place, seeds can last many years. “The bigger the seed, the longer the life span,” White says. A bean can sprout after 20 years, or many more, if it has been kept in a freezer. For White, saving seeds isn’t just about stashing them in a vault for some distant future; it’s about preserving the know-how to grow and keep them alive season after season. “If we want a resilient food supply in the face of climate change,” she says, “we need seeds that are continuing to adapt.”
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How to Save Seeds - The New York Times
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